Jivaja (Soul Cavern Series Book 1) Read online

  “Careful out there, Sara,” Maggie said.

  Sara laughed. “I will, Mom.”

  David watched her without moving, uncertain whether to follow. Finally, he stood and took his coffee too, which was in a paper cup. He’d left his Danish untouched. He wasn’t really hungry anymore.

  “It’s only a couple blocks away,” she said when he joined her outside.

  David nodded and scanned the crowd as they walked. He didn’t want to go back to her place. He didn’t want to get that close to her. Not only for her sake, but for his. He didn’t want her personalized any more than she already was.

  But he had no choice.

  “So who are you looking for?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” Did she know about the vampires, if that's what they were? About Mecca being kidnapped? Surely not. Surely his paranoia was knocking him in the head and scrambling his brains.

  “Well, you keep checking everyone out. Thought you were looking for someone.”

  “Oh. No, I’m not. Just keeping an eye out.”

  “Okay, if you say so.” They walked half a block. “What is it you think is on this thing?”

  David hesitated. He hadn’t wanted to bring her into things, but he did anyway. Because he was selfish. So now, didn’t he owe her some of the truth? Maybe. “I’m hoping something on it will lead to where my daughter is.”

  The rhythm of her step faltered, but she recovered quickly. “What happened to her?”

  “I don't know. Someone has her.”

  “You didn’t call the cops.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” She quieted for a moment. “Mom never mentioned that you have a daughter.”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “She just doesn’t.” She tensed beside him, but he didn’t elaborate. He felt a little crazy just then. His worlds were on a slow-motion collision course. And he couldn’t stop it.

  Sara quickened her pace and turned a corner to the right. After several minutes, she pointed to an old, but well-maintained, wood frame home. Painted a robin’s egg blue with white trim, it fit in well with the other pastel homes on the street. She took the steps up and unlocked the door. The door on the right. He hadn’t realized it was a duplex when he’d first looked at it.

  “How does a college student afford this?”

  She held the door open. “Mom bought it with the money you gave her after Gran died. She saved every check in an account for my education. She used that savings to pay for my college, and she bought this. She rents the other side out to some nursing students.” Sadness tickled at the corners of her eyes as she added, “She comes here sometimes.”

  Susan's only daughter, Grace — Sara’s mom — had been thirteen when David married Susan. Grace had just graduated from high school when her mother died, and Grace had gone over the edge, plunging into silence and refusing to speak to anyone for months.

  One evening about two months after Susan died, David had returned home early from work and found her passed out in the bathtub with an unlabeled prescription bottle, empty, on the floor.

  It had been a turning point for him. He'd tried to make amends. Was still trying. He continued to send Grace a check every month, though he hadn't spoken to her in decades. She'd gone through emotional hell to make a life for herself, he knew. That she was funding Sara's college life with the money didn't surprise him.

  Serious second thoughts — who the hell was he kidding? Third and fourth thoughts — flitted through his mind about whether he could handle this situation. He could just leave, find some other way to crack the hard drive. Or maybe Jim could give him more information on how to find Laos. Even as he thought of each of his options, he knew none of them were valid. Sara was his best hope. But, God, he hated it.

  The house looked larger on the inside than it looked from the outside. He came into the main area from the foyer to find a stairway leading up along the left wall. The living room opened to the right.

  A comfortable-looking blue sofa and rust-colored love seat crowded around an oak coffee table. Nothing matched. Goodwill decor at its finest. A battered armoire that probably housed a television leaned against the front wall. The living room faded into the dining area toward the far wall and ended in a swinging door which he assumed led to the kitchen.

  Sara locked the front door and came into the room, unloading the satchel onto the floor near a silver umbrella stand. She bent and retrieved the hard drive. “The setup is downstairs.” She pointed to a door set into the paneling beneath the stairway to the second floor. “You want more coffee?”

  “No thanks. Any more caffeine and I’ll start jitterbugging.”

  She laughed as she slid a key into the lock on the basement door.

  “You keep it locked?”

  “Yep. Lots of expensive and secret stuff down there. Shh.” She winked at him and led the way, turning left after entering the doorway. She led him down a flight of wooden steps.

  The air cooled the lower they went, and David took a deep breath. He realized he was starting to relax. He didn’t think they’d been followed, but he was still surprised at the safety he felt. His muscles began to unknot themselves.

  “Light,” Sara said. Brightness illuminated the room and the hum of computers filled the air.

  The basement spanned the entire length of the house. The concrete floor should have made it like a cell, but the cherry red paint covering the floor offset that impression a lot. Furniture and equipment took up much of the space. Each wall had been painted a different, bright color, a lot like a kid's playroom. David suspected Sara spent most of her time down here.

  A microwave and sink huddled in the back corner, near a brown dorm fridge covered in stickers. A coffee maker on top of it held about an inch of dark sludge. The light for the hot plate was off.

  Two desks dominated the room: one was large and L-shaped, pushed up against the wall where four flat-screen monitors had been mounted. The smaller desk stood almost in the middle of the room with another desktop computer with two more monitors along with several docking stations with multiple ports on each. Homemade cinder-block bookshelves stuffed with books lined the front wall, where the door would be upstairs.

  “Welcome to Headquarters.” Sara smirked.

  “Interesting place.” He walked around as she plopped into the chair in front of the wall-mounted monitors. They each had different things on them. One a Windows desktop, two with Linux desktops, and the fourth held lines and lines of code, green on black background.

  “Yeah, it’s home.” She took the hard drive and hooked it up to a tangle of cords jumbled together at the back of the desk.

  The bookcase caught David’s attention. He found an interesting range of subjects from black holes to computer books. And there was Ender’s Game, snuggled in between Stephen Hawking and .NET architecture. David smiled, though his heart ached with regret. Again.

  “Sara.”

  She looked up, startled. “I didn’t think you even knew my real name.”

  “Of course I know your name.” It startled him that she would think he wouldn't. He wandered over to her desk. “How’s Grace — sorry, your mom?”

  Sara shrugged and went back to installing the drive as she spoke. “Okay, I guess. Slightly boozy, but that’s normal for her. It’s been worse.” She typed her password in to the computer.

  “Hello, Sara.” A deep, masculine voice tinged with a Scottish brogue, boomed through the room. Sara grinned. “A little megalomaniacal indulgence there.”

  David couldn’t keep from laughing. It felt good. “We all have our vices.”

  Her eyes twinkled. She leaned back in the chair and waved a hand at the monitor in front, which had changed from the original Windows desktop to the password screen that David had seen in the warehouse office. A small black square was now in the lower right corner.

  Sara tapped some keys and word combinations began flashing through the box
. “There won’t be a whole lot to see until the program cracks the password. It’ll just go through the dictionary first, then it will add special characters and numbers and stuff. Finally it will start a methodical testing of random groups of characters and numbers until it eventually finds the right combination.”

  They watched it for a few moments, and David asked, “How long will this take?”

  “It could take five minutes. It could take three days.”

  “Three days? How do we speed it up?”

  “We don’t. It’s going as fast as its little processor can go. And actually, that’s pretty fast. You hungry?”

  His belly growled, and he remembered his uneaten Danish at Brew-haha. “Well, yes, I suppose that means I am.”

  She laughed. “Come on upstairs, and we’ll see what I’ve got in the fridge. Don’t expect a gourmet meal or anything. I’m not my mom.” She stood and made her way up the stairs, leaving him to follow.

  “I considered going into the military and getting into cryptography,” Sara said, between bites of scrambled eggs. “But I’m pretty sure I couldn’t handle the whole authority hierarchy thing. I’m more of a loner. And then there's all the fighting. And the guns.”

  “Not a big gun fan?”

  “Not at all.”

  David nodded, munching on a slice of buttered toast. His belly finally felt comfortably full. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten. “I can understand your decision about the service. So you want to go into computer security then?”

  “Yeah, I think that would be cool. And it’s something I’m good at. I’d also like to expand into AI. That’s an amazing field right now, along with VR. Man. Love that shit.” She raised her shoulders in a shrug. “I guess it’s a gift, but computers have always been really, really easy for me. I built my first one from spare parts when I was ten or eleven. It’s just a knack.”

  “I’m glad your mom gave you my e-mail address when you came out here for school. I’ll admit, it was a surprise to find that out too. A strange coincidence.”

  Sara finished her last slice of bacon and downed her milk. “Well, the university has an outstanding prof who’s doing some amazing stuff with AI. That’s the real reason I chose to come here. I had a full-on scholarship to Brown, but decided I’d rather hang out with the really big geeks.” Her smile lit her face, and it reminded David again of her grandmother.

  He pushed back his chair and stood. “Let me clean up?”

  “Sure. I hate doing dishes. Anyway, I’ll go check on the computer. Maybe we got lucky.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “Nope, but I’m going to check anyway.”

  David gathered the dishes and tried to keep his guilt in check. He'd tried to do his best by Grace. It had been her slow, painful descent into alcoholism and self-sabotage that burrowed into him. He didn’t know why he’d kept in contact with her. He suspected that a bit of remorse had set in after years of coldness; he felt responsible for her breakdown.

  He hadn't remarried after Susan. Not until he met Teresa. And Teresa had changed everything. She’d made him a better man. A much better man.

  David finished washing the dishes and set about drying, leaving them stacked on the counter top to be put away. After, he left the kitchen and went down to the basement. Sara was leaned back in the chair, her feet perched on the edge of the desk. Her gaze fixed on the screen, watching the characters fly by. A thick trade paperback lay open on her lap.

  “Any luck?”

  “No.” She looked up at him. “Man, you look beat. I think your jitterbugging days are done. You wanna nap for a while? There’s a spare room upstairs.”

  David hadn’t thought about it in a while, but when she mentioned sleeping, he realized he was fast coming to the end of his line. The energy pull and the coffee had lasted a while, but with a full belly, he found himself droopy. His only other option would be to take from Sara, and he wasn’t willing to do that.

  “Yes, that’s a good idea. You’ll call me if the program cracks the hard drive?”

  “You bet. I wouldn’t know what you’re looking for anyway. Bedroom’s the second door on the right at the top of the stairs. Bathroom’s just across the hall. Towels under the sink.”

  He smiled as he mounted the stairs to the living room. “Thanks.”

  Chapter Ten: Claude

  “What is it?” Salas asked. He’d been laying out Claude’s attire for the day and had included a set of cuff links which housed stones of a bright blue — lapis lazuli. Set in silver, the beautiful stone tapped something inside Claude’s mind. It had been his mother’s stone. She had worn it for wisdom in leading the Visci.

  “I’ve finally remembered.”

  Salas stared at him for a moment, a shirt in hand, and then realization dawned in his eyes. “Mecca Trenow?”

  “Yes.” Claude turned and slid his arms into the silky sleeves of the garment Salas held out for him.

  The memories had come to the forefront in pieces, chunks. The wild flurry within the throne room, the hushed whispers. Flashes of a mummified corpse being carried in.

  “We had one of her kind invade our kingdom when I was very young.” He began fastening the ivory buttons, his mind only half in the present. “I’d forgotten.”

  “What happened?” Salas continued holding garments out for him in the manner he preferred — pants Claude stepped into himself, a jacket offered.

  “I was never told the actual details. I was still a child. But what I pieced together from eavesdropping and listening to the servants gossip was frightening. A man had come from the east — I don’t think I ever learned where — and he had been traveling with a family heading for Spain.”

  Salas paused in his attendance and watched Claude as he listened.

  “I had an uncle who made a habit of preying on travelers, though my mother had done many things to try to break him of this habit. It had been his body — a husk, really — that I’d seen them bring in. It was as if he’d been dug up from a grave after having been long dead.” The wispy, thin scattering of hair on the corpse’s head was what had stuck with Claude. His uncle had had a full, thick crop of midnight black hair. What was left on the corpse had been fragile, white, and nothing like what Claude had known of him.

  “Did they discover what happened?”

  Claude tried to remember details, but they were slow in coming. Four hundred years of memory was a lot to sift through. “I think they did, but I don’t recall anything specific. As I said, I was young. I do remember a word though.” He had been hiding under the great table, listening to the discussion when his mother had said it, almost in a whisper. “Jivaja.”

  “I do not think I know what the word means.”

  “It means ‘mover of essence.’ Of life force.” He looked Silas in the eyes. “I believe that is what our Ms. Trenow is.”

  Salas gave nod. “I will see what I might find on these Jivaja. Perhaps there is more information out there.”

  “Very good. Now, here. My shoes and then the blood. I have things to do.”

  The switch only took moments. Claude suspended the plastic IV bag, dark red and bloated with his blood, above Mecca’s bed. Like a swollen corpse on a gallows, it hung from the metal stand while Mecca slumbered through her drug-induced nap.

  He clamped the plastic tube, so he wouldn't spill any of Emilia's blood onto the sleeping girl when he unhooked the bag. He reattached the clear tube to his own bag and less than a minute later, with Emilia’s blood hidden inside the satchel at his hip, Claude stepped out of Mecca’s room into the empty hallway. The door lock whirred as the latch caught.

  When he reached his own quarters, he found Salas waiting for him in the sitting room, as he expected. Claude drew the satchel off and held it out to his manservant.

  “Dispose of this.”

  Salas wound the strap around his burly hand. “Did you have any trouble?”

  “None at all. Will had already stepped out for his own rest. Emilia is l
imiting access to that floor so as not garner any extra attention.”

  “She’s keeping the girl a secret.”

  “Of course,” Claude said. “Mecca has the potential to be a very powerful weapon, if handled properly.”

  “You’ll have to control Emilia in order to control the girl.” Salas lifted the satchel for a moment. “Your blood will only help a little bit if Emilia is the one Mecca chooses to be bound to.”

  Claude had thought of that. It would be complicated. He’d replaced Emilia’s blood with his own twice now. He had to ensure that most of what Mecca received was his. Otherwise, Emilia’s hold over the girl would be stronger or, worse, if the levels remained equal, Mecca would choose, albeit subconsciously.

  He didn't think Mecca knew her own ancestry, and he didn’t know much about the Jivaja. He couldn’t even be sure the blood would affect her as it did humans.

  But Claude wanted her. And he would have her.

  Emilia could be manipulated, if he were careful about it. She’d changed much since she’d last been with him. The past hundred and a half years, she'd come into her own strengths and found for herself that part of her he'd always seen as destined for leadership.

  Despite her independence, he felt confident that he could still bring her under his control. But he wasn’t sure he would be able to direct Mecca in the way he wanted if he had to do it through Emilia. He would contemplate that bridge crossing a bit later.

  “I don’t think Mecca will choose to be bound at all,” Claude said. “I believe she will fight. And she will have to be taken. It's the way with her kind.”

  Though the look on Salas’s face showed his curiosity, Claude was glad his servant controlled himself. It had taken decades to train the man to keep his tongue, to hold his curiosity.

  “Go and get rid of that,” Claude said, waving a hand at the satchel in Salas’s grip.

  “As you wish.” Salas took four long strides and placed his hand on the doorknob. “Emilia asked for you to stop by her suite when you have a moment.”